As the city of Chicago began the plan to transform its notoriously poorly-run Chicago Housing Authority in the early 1990s, many wondered what would become of its residents and the surrounding communities. This recent report from the Urban Institute looks into the “complex relationship between public housing transformation and crime in Chicago and Atlanta.” Authored by five different researchers at the Institute, this 11-page document takes a close look at crime rates in the communities that relocated public housing residents into private-market housing. The report notes that the effects were “not the simplistic relationship implied by media accounts, but rather a complex picture of declining crime rates in both cities, a small net decrease in violent crime citywide associated with the transformation efforts, but effects in some neighborhoods—those that received more than a few relocated households—that suggest that crime would have been lower in those neighborhoods had there been no public housing transformation.” The report includes a number of helpful charts and summary statistics, and it will be most useful to policy analysts and planners

Tax expenditures are getting increased scrutiny from budget hawks and tax reformers. New Treasury estimates, released as part of President Obama’s recent budget, indicate that these tax preferences will reduce individual and corporate income tax revenues by almost $1.1 trillion in 2012. Those provisions will also increase spending on refundable tax credits by $91 billion and will reduce payroll and excise tax receipts by $113 billion. Together, tax expenditures will total almost $1.3 trillion this year.

At a conference cosponsored by the Urban Institute, the Pension Rights Center, and Covington & Burling, Institute fellow Eugene Steuerle presented options for allowing workers to purchase annuities within Social Security, as well as granting partial benefits to accommodate phased retirement. While such options technically exist today, they are buried deep within the maze of Social Security’s complex provisions. Simplifying and clarifying these options would enable workers to provide themselves with a greater degree of inflation-protected longevity insurance in retirement.

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COMMENTARY ON HEALTH CARE

“On health care, what’s ‘proper’?” – By Stan Dorn
The most worrisome part of the Supreme Court’s three-day hearing on the Affordable Care Act completely escaped mention in all the oceans of real and virtual ink that were spilled to cover the case. Stan Dorn explains in his “proper” commentary for the McClatchy-Tribune News Service.

Title: Oral Health Promotion among Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract:
Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) comprises a heterogeneous spectrum of neuro-developmental disorders that includes Autistic disorder, Asperger’s syndrome and pervasive development disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS). It is behaviourally defined and characterized by impairments in communication and social interaction, along with repetitive, stereotypical patterns of behaviour, interests, or activity (APA 2000).

A systematic review has estimated that ASD affects approximately 20 per 10,000 children globally (Williams et al. 2006). In Hong Kong SAR, the prevalence of ASD among children under the age of 15 is 16.1 per 10,000, and the male to female ratio is ~6:1 (Wong and Hui 2008).

Several studies have reported a higher prevalence of dental caries experience (DMFT>0) among children with autism, when compared to unaffected children (Marshall et al. 2010; Lowe and Lindemann 1985). Studies among children with ASD have reported the prevalence of gingivitis to be between 50-60% (Klein and Nowak 1999, DeMattei et al. 2007). Past research has shown that children with autism and their families have compromised quality of life (QOL) in several domains. (Kuhlthau et al. 2010, Kamp-Becker et al. 2010, Allik et al. 2006, Shu 2009).

The objectives of our study is 1) to compare the clinical oral health and the subjective oral health among preschool children with and without ASD; 2) to evaluate the effectiveness of a visual pedagogy intervention in the performance of the task of tooth-brushing and improvement in oral hygiene status and gingival health among preschool children with ASD; 3) to evaluate the effectiveness of a visual pedagogy intervention in the performance of oral examination among children with ASD.

Is it possible to wade through the wide world of news about Missouri without getting overwhelmed? This website makes the process a snap, and it’s a fabulous resource created by the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri. The program is supported by journalism professionals and students animated by The Journalist’s Creed, which was authored by the first dean of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, Walter Williams. First-time you should read the creed, and then navigate the site to follow live action and audio from the state’s house and senate. You can use the “Stories” area to look up recent news pieces by subject, date, and staff member. Moving along, you can search for information about state government, the Supreme Court dockets, and find out how each member of the state’s legislative body voted on recent bills. It’s a rather fine resource, and the Twitter feed is also worth a look.

The ProQuest Taiwan-HK Digital Dissertation Consortium website will be performing systems upgrade and unavailable from 12 am to 2pm on Friday, 20 April 2012. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

The American Journal of Social Issues and Humanities is an international platform for Social Scientists, Bioethical Scholars, Medical Professionals, Scholars in Humanities and Professors involved in all kinds of Research to publish their research findings.

American Journal of Social Issues and Humanities is available free of charge as an Open Access journal on the Internet.